UT's oils, gas drilling dream is misguided

OUR VIEW

Today, members of the State Building Commission could approve a proposal from the University of Tennessee for permission to use hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to extract oil and natural gas from the shale under the 8,000-acre Cumberland Research Forest.

The commission should reject this proposal, as much for the covert manner in which UT has pursued project and the revenues it is likely to produce as for the uncertainty about the safety of the extraction process.

It seems that UT, a public university, wants to become a player in the fossil-fuel industry. To do so, it would have to make this pursuit appear to be "research," and not business. Whether UT is able to persuade the commission that it is on the up-and-up will be seen.

The details that have been uncovered so far, by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and others, suggest that UT officials are blinded by dollar signs. Conversations with partners New River Energy and CONSOL Energy about the possibility of obtaining oil and leases in the Cumberland Research Forest talk of royalty shares, construction of new or upgraded access roads to the forest, and the resulting benefits to timber harvests.

All of this on public land that has been assigned high environmental value. For example, it contains one of the few remaining mature hardwood tracts in the Cumberland Mountains and the Cowan Creek watershed. Fracking's effects on groundwater supplies are hotly debated in other states such as Pennsylvania, where oil and gas companies have rapidly expanded use of the process.

Perhaps because of the public debate, UT has felt it could characterize this plan as "research."

While SELC "agrees that research is needed on the environmental impacts of fracking," the center's review of UT documents concludes the project is "deeply flawed." Its very dependency upon royalties from the drilling poses a conflict of interest.

Furthermore, there has been only one bidder for an oil and gas lease - New River Energy/CONSOL - and, as it turns out, the private conversation began as long ago as November 2001.

If drilling in the Cumberland Research Forest was ever a good idea, it now has been compromised by the lack of transparency on UT's part. It appears that this proposal would do more harm than good - to the natural value of the forest, to the safety of people living of the Cowan Creek watershed, and to the reputation of UT as an objective research institution.

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UT's oils, gas drilling dream is misguided

The State Building Commission should reject a proposal from the University of Tennessee for permission to use hydraulic fracturing, or 'fracking,' to extract oil and natural gas from the shale under